Why Timothée Chalamet Lost the Oscar for Best Actor

In the words of Public Image Ltd.: “This is what you want; this is what you get.”

What Timothée Chalamet wanted was to become the second-youngest Best Actor winner in Oscars history. What he got instead was a three-week festival of disappointment as every corner of the film industry — the Brits in BAFTA, the TikTok influencers in SAG-AFTRA, and the living legends in the Academy — proclaimed in one voice: Not yet.

Chalamet’s Best Actor loss to Michael B. Jordan on Sunday night was the final step in what turned out to be a head-spinning rise and fall for the 30-year-old actor over the course of this awards season. Ever since early October, when Marty Supreme premiered with a secret screening at the New York Film Festival, Chalamet had been considered a strong candidate to take the prize that had eluded him on his two previous nominations. “Timmy is a live wire,” my colleague Joe Reid raved of his performance. “Funny and infuriating and kinetic, it’s the kind of performance you know will become signature. It’s the kind of performance that could win an Oscar.” When Chalamet followed up these raves with wins at the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, the Oscar appeared to be his to lose.

And then he lost. What happened? 

While Monday-morning quarterbacking Chalamet’s reversal of fortune, it will be impossible to avoid the étoile in the room: his controversial comments on ballet and opera and their relative importance to the average consumer vis-à-vis the movies. Or, translated into Chalamese: “No one cares about this thing anymore.” While these comments spurred a media firestorm, they blew up only on the final day of Oscars voting, so it’s hard to know how much weight the controversy had on the eventual result. (Unless you’re one of those Oscars-watchers who theorizes that the new rules meant more voters waited until the last minute to turn in their ballots, in which case it might have contributed a great deal.)

Still, whether or not you think the ballet controversy created the Oscar loss, it seems clear that both events are downstream of the same root cause: People just got a little sick of Timothée Chalamet by the end of the season in a way that illuminates the struggle of the young A-lister hoping for an Oscar.

Even as he was piling up precursor trophies, Chalamet was walking the tightrope of overexposure. As Hunter Harris noted, since Wonka opened on Christmas 2023, Chalamet has essentially been on a never-ending publicity tour. Up next was Dune: Part Two, then A Complete Unknown, and finally Marty Supreme. That’s a lot of Chalamet for one media ecosystem to handle, particularly when two of those films also require six-month Best Actor campaigns and, especially, when one of those campaigns was the Marty Supreme campaign.

When an actor starts gunning for an Oscar, they have two basic options. They can run an I Am My Character campaign, or they can run an I’m Not My Character campaign. In Best Actress last year, Demi Moore went with I Am My Character (Our struggle was the same!), and Mikey Madison went with I’m Not My Character (I’m actually quite shy).

For Marty Supreme, Chalamet went whole hog into I Am My Character. From the jump, his strategy was to intentionally play up the most Marty-like aspects of his star image. Ahead of the film’s release, he leaked a fake marketing meeting playacting as a deluded narcissist. (“This has got to be the most important thing that happens on Planet Earth this year.”) He kept up the act on the movie’s press tour, telling one journalist he’d been turning in “really committed, top-of-the-line performances” for nearly a decade: “I don’t want people to take it for granted. This is really some top-level shit.” The interview was subsequently deleted from the journalist’s YouTube page, either because people didn’t get the joke or because the joke was unintentionally revealing. (Here it’s worth noting that Chalamet’s creative director, Aidan Zamiri, is also the director of Charli XCX’s similarly meta mockumentary The Moment.) Regardless, these stunts were reminiscent of remarks Chalamet had made in total sincerity after winning Best Actor at last year’s SAG Awards. “The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said back then. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” He may have been only pretending to be pretentious, but as the saying goes: You are who you pretend to be.

This was a risk, because the role of Marty is not the kind of part that typically gets people trophies. He would have been the slimiest character to win Best Actor since Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. But it’s important to note that this press tour was not Timmy in give-me-an-Oscar mode. This was Timmy in opening-a-movie mode. And in that regard, his approach was a smashing success. Marty Supreme pulled in nearly $100 million domestic, becoming A24’s highest-grossing film ever. When the calendar turned to 2026, Chalamet switched gears. He cast aside his all-orange-everything ensembles for a more subdued red-carpet style. He cut a more mature figure at his podium appearances, shouting out Kylie Jenner at the Critics Choice Awards as “my partner of three years.” (The word partner being further proof that he had recently turned 30.)

The ease with which Chalamet turned over a new leaf rankled some observers, but the scent of Marty was not so easily washed away. In part, that’s because this was of course the role Chalamet was nominated for at all those awards shows. And partly because it was the culmination of a type of performance the actor had been honing for years. Paul Atreides in Dune, Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme — these are all characters defined by otherworldly gifts, monomaniacal drive, and a cold-blooded disregard for the concerns of others. Coincidentally the same qualities we associate with movie stars!

Consider, too, that as the months wore on, the vibes around Marty Supreme only got worse, stemming from a scandal over director Josh Safdie’s previous film Good Time, and lingering discontent over the presence of Trump ally Kevin O’Leary in the cast. Compare that to Sinners, which only spurred more and more good feelings over the closing stretch. Once Jordan won at SAG, he was now a viable alternative to Chalamet — and one much easier to root for.

I suspect that is why the ballet remarks went as viral as they did: They were emblematic of a vibe that had already been emanating from Chalamet, onscreen and off, for a long time. You saw the difference at SAG, when Michael B. Jordan turned in a humble, gracious, and, above all, surprised acceptance speech. Sitting stone-faced in the audience, Chalamet couldn’t help seeming more princely and entitled by comparison. When was the last time he was surprised to win something?

The sad thing is, it’s easy to see Chalamet’s recent choices as a conscious decision to pivot toward the kind of roles that would get him closer to an Oscar. As the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan has written, the Oscars’ infamous bias against young men is essentially a bias against heartthrobs — the more an actor appeals to young women, the more likely the largely male, largely middle-aged membership of the Academy is to write him off as a lightweight. For Chalamet, who came to fame playing a queer teen in Call Me by Your Name and love interests in Lady Bird and Little Women, butch-ing up his image was a logical step toward being taken seriously. Hence choosing movies, and doing viral stunts, that would build up his profile among men. Like, say, a video interview with Matthew McConaughey …

We’ve now seen what happens when bro-ing out goes wrong. And perhaps this whole saga illuminates another reason why voters prefer to make young hunks wait until their late 30s, as Jordan did, to get their Oscar — to teach them humility. Everybody’s got to learn sometime.